Event overview
Presented by Christabel Stirling, Royal College of Music
This seminar will focus on ethnographies of music and sound in contemporary urban environments, drawing on a body of ethnographic work produced over the last 10 years as part of my PhD research and as a postdoc on the ERC-funded project SONCITIES.
I will start by exploring how ethnography’s slow, non-totalising mode of research multiplication can help us to ‘draw the city near’ (Simone 2014), while also posing significant challenges regarding the proliferation and containment of complexity.
I will talk about the specifics of conducting urban ethnography in a musical/sonic register—for example, how music and sound are often the primary realms through which differences of all kinds jostle and challenge one another on the urban public stage, sometimes antagonistically; but equally how sound, in its relational ontology, is a powerful medium and method for understanding how, qualitatively, such differences often manage to co-exist and function together.
I will discuss my use of experimental and participatory ‘live methods’ (Back & Puwar 2012), such as audio journaling, DIY field recording, and hand-drawn mind mapping, probing the kinds of understanding that such methods afford and the ethical challenges they raise. And I will touch on my current work producing two research outputs—a collaborative multi-media platform and an ethnographic piece of writing—from the same fieldwork material, talking through some of the interesting problems this presents.
Dr Christabel Stirling is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Royal College of Music.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 27 Mar 2025 | 2:00pm - 4:00pm |
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